I am going to do the best I can to explain this, but I am not sure how well I will do at it as I don't fully understand the problem.

I guess I will try to explain the issue first and then give you some files.

First off, the gentoo livecd 2005.1 works without a problem, boots fine every time. The issue I am having is when grub loads my kernel. It freezes a lot right after it loads the IO Scheduler and after looking it is right before it loads the RTC timer. I have notice that off of a fresh boot it will stop right there everytime, and then when I reboot it goes through fine. Now if I reboot again, it will hit that point every single time there after. I have to turn the machine off, what a few seconds, turn it on, let it freeze reboot and then it will load, and it will go through that cycle everytime.

I have tried the different IO Schedulers and RTC timers. The only thing I haven't tried is leaving everything for RTC and IO schedulers out. (I will try that here in a little bit).

Another thing to note, is everytime it hits that spot in when the kernel loads, whether it hangs there or not, is it will beep 3 times.

After talking to the guy who owned it before me, he said when he ran ESX on it, they told him he had to disable APIC to get it to work.

Well I dove into the kernel Docs to read about it, and with SMP machines, APIC is enabled by default, and the options doesn't show up in the menuconfig when you choose SMP. I could go into the .config and disable it by hand, but I only have ssh access at the moment and don't want it to crash while I am out.

Well it seems if you have SMP enabled, whether or not the .config has APIC enabled or not, it throws it in by deafult. I am going to try compiling a kernel without SMP (and therefore without APIC) and see how that goes._________________GibbonsR.net | OpenLaptops.org

SMP relies on APIC. If APIC is broken on your machine then SMP is broken too. It isn't a kernel thing at all, SMP needs APIC.

That is what I have found out, thanks for confirming.

I am not sure what it is exactly. I can re-produce everystep every time, which makes me think it might be a kernel mis-configuration, if not with the IO APIC, then when something that is closely related.

I haven't had time to look at it in the past day or two, but the guy before me said Windows 2000/2003 ran fine on it, and with EXS he said their tech support said he had to do something with APIC , I will see if you can find what he had to do. I look through the BIOS and couldn't find anything regarding OS type( read about this with some Compaq's) or anything else related to APIC or RTC.

Well, a month later and I finally got back to screwing with it. I was going to try a different raid card, but the motherboard would never post with it in, so I went back to the Intel card and decided to do some kernel testing, so I loaded up the 2.6.16-rc6 vanilla-sources and sure enough, everything is working fine.

I have no idea what it was, the only thing I really did differently was put some scsi debugging in the kernel. Other then that, it is pretty much exactly the same.

I am going to take this .config, and try it with the older sources to see how goes it, i even tried the 2.6.15-3 vanilla-sources with the same problem.

Now I am going to backtrack everything with the kernel config that works and see if it was kernel related or just my config related. I have had lots of problems with the 2.6.15 kernel on other machines, just weird issues, so I wouldn't be suprised to see this as the problem.

For those finding this later on and being dissapointed by the lack of specifics, here is some more detailed info.
- There doesn't appear to be any bug reports matching this problem (searching for io scheduler).
- It appears that starting from 2.6.15-r7 which is masked at the time of writing, the problem is solved (to give an actual revision to vague "the more recent revisions").